How (and why) do Shopitize users engage with brands? / Graham Halling

Nobody (I think!) disputes that engagement is now the key battleground and one of the key measures in marketing directly to shoppers. But what is true shopper-engagement and perhaps more importantly, how do you make it pay? Every day I see lots of beautiful examples of FMCG brands practising digital customer engagement, offering all kinds of benefits and experiences from video recipes to augmented reality, Facebook competitions to virtual factory tours but I’m often left wondering if anyone in the process has forgotten what the ultimate customer engagement is….. a purchase. It remains the most (only?) bankable measure of engagement and yet I’m often seeing it entirely absent or at best, enabled through a digital-only mechanic (and thus irrelevant to at least 80% of the shopper audience).

Not great from a ROI perspective certainly but also bad business in many other ways. What has the customer actually had to do or demonstrate in order to receive their content or experience? How is a genuinely “loyal” customer who buys your product regularly, being offered something any different to the buyer of a competitor brand who simply likes your free recipes? Is there a measure of what impact this “engagement” has had on either of these parties in terms of how much more likely they are to purchase your products?

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